Friday, November 11, 2011

It's the Shia Eschatology, Stupid

1 comment:

The Leftist Western intelligentsia--which is to say, the bulk of professional intellectuals--have so internalized Marxist economicism that they cannot make themselves believe that people will fight for other than economic class interests. Now, I would say that even a cursory reading of actual history, as opposed to history filtered by dialectical-materialist analysis, shows that religious and nationalistic fervor are much more potent historical forces than economics: I have yet to read any convincing economicist explanation of how the advent of Joan of Arc served to rally an all-but-defeated French nation to victory over the English, or just how the American ruling class benefited from the death, devastation, and economic dislocation brought about by the Civil War. For that matter, the purportedly Marxist Soviet peasants and workers who fought with fanatical courage to repel the Nazi invaders of the _Rodina_, were motivated by appeals to their Russian patriotism and Slavic identity, not by fealty to Marx's or Lenin's doctrines of class struggle; heck, Stalin even brought the Orthodox Church out of mothballs (having in many cases to scour the concentration camps for surviving clergy) to bolster his soldiers' sense of national and cultural identity.

Well, as the old saw goes, none is so blind as he who will not see. I just hope that the inauguration of a new (Republican) President in 2013 won't be too late to forestall the deployment of Iranian nukes. The glimmer of hope is that, with the exception of Ron Paul, who is an old-fashioned isolationist, the stable of would-be Republican Presidential nominees all seem to be pretty clear-sighted about the danger of allowing Iran to proceed unmolested, save by token economic sanctions (premised, of course, on the economicist view of history); maybe, just maybe, the U. S. will act before the Iranians can detonate a few A-bombs here and there.

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Scaramouche is my nom de Web. My real name is Mindy G. Alter, and I like to think of myself as a free speecher with a sense of humour. My bailiwick: fighting on behalf of all the good things that free speech helps safeguard, and doing my utmost to highlight the malevolence and imbicilities of those who oppose freedom, whomever they may be.